Healthcare Utilisation Behaviour in India: Socio-economic Disparities and The Effect of Health Insurance

To tackle the issues of inequality in healthcare utilisation, impoverishment due to increasing out of pocket (OOP) health expenditure and increasing dependence on the recourse of informal sources of healthcare, strengthening the role of insurance within the health systems has been gaining importance in low and middle income countries, where India is no exception. Even for universal health coverage, provision of health insurance (HI) is seen one of the major agenda for policy makers. However, a little is known in aggregate level whether HI status leads to change in utilisation behaviour in India. Hence, this paper aims to analyse the impact of HI status on healthcare utilisation behaviour of the individuals using Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS) 2004-05, a nationally representative survey data. Logit, Tobit and Multinomial Logit Models have been used to analyse the impact of HI status along with socio-economic factors on healthcare utilisation behaviour. From the result we found that HI doesn’t have statistically significant impact on utilisation behaviour after controlling various socio-economic variables. On the other hand various socio-economic factors significantly have affected the utilisation. However, the possible reasons for the insignificant result of HI have been explained and various policy recommendations out of